Supervisor Paul Feiner has created a sanctuary Town with Greenburgh and it's getting worse by the day. It manifests itself it several ways. The multiple families living in single family homes are costing us more than just crowded housing conditions. The Journal News ran a story of an underage drinking party in the Fulton Park neighborhood, hosted by a sixteen year old who gave his address as 21 McKinley Avenue in White Plains. Why? Because his parents own the house but its rented out, and overcrowded with at least four families living in a single family home. In fact, an agency refers prospective tenants to the location!
This isn't the only home in the neighborhood that is perverted this way. Some will say it's not so bad. After all, everyone needs a place to live. ABG agrees, they do need a place to live. We have numerous apartments throughout the Town and in other neighborhoods for rent. They should live there. We're not speaking of families who move in because they've been hammered by the economy, had a loss to due a fire, or were getting out of an abusive relationship. They are welcome to move in until they can sustain themselves. So what's the problem?
We pay the Town water bill based on usage by the gallon per year. The money appropriated in our budget year after year is based on the mean average ratio of water usage to single-family and multiple-family homes, commercial usage and a few other minor factors. When four families live in a single-family home, the unofficial water usage quadruples for no “apparent” reason. After all, the Town cannot prove increased water usage through billing. More importantly, when we go over the agreed to amount of water by even one gallon, our cost per gallon goes up exponentially.
We pay the Town refuse bill by the pound. After the sanitation employees pick up your garbage, and the truck is filled, its next journey is up to the Peekskill process plant where the truck is weighed by tons (and pounds) and the garbage is off-loaded and incinerated. Cha-ching! Four families living in a single-family home generate four times more garbage than say a family of three or four people living in a single-family house. Add to that the non-garbage trash that multi-household groups generate. Since it fills up our garbage trucks faster, they make more trips to the Peekskill plant, ultimately paying more for garbage incineration.
We pay school taxes base on the square footage of our homes. Four families living in a single-family home may have an average of one to four kids for which our taxes are paying for schooling. Obviously, the number can always be lower or higher. But the number of teachers we hire and classes we maintain is based on the size of the homes and apartments we have in our Town. The amount of kids registered to attend the schools is another factor. We have seen a burgeoning growth in enrollment and our school taxes are ever-increasing because more children are attending school than we can tax for and afford. This also begs the question of how the school district utilizes all the monies gained from students who attend private and parochial schools?
We pay for overcrowding with safety violations and safety concerns for both the residents and the first responders. Across the street from ABG is another of the room-rental single-family homes. The police are there with regularity. One of the cops told me he was momentarily disoriented after entering the multi-occupant basement/garage apartments and pursuing the perpetrator. Once he was out and arrested the man, I asked him if he was going to contact the building department about the illegal apartment. He told me he was not allowed to. What!? If there had been a fire, God only knows how many people might not have been found and perished as well as what might happen to our firefighters.
All of the above illustrates why larger homes, in general, pay higher taxes than a smaller home. It also illustrates the fundamental problems we're having with our ever-increasing taxes, which are becoming unsupportable in our Town residents by ignoring the overcrowding problem throughout our Town. Supervisor Feiner suggested changing our building codes to allow people to rent out rooms because this would be easier to do than correct the problem. This would be a big mistake! It's like saying we'll raise the speed limit since we can't enforce the law against speeding. This situation must be corrected - and soon. We need to address this before someone loses their life.
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